Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [330]
Sybilla said, ‘That appears to be true.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Marthe. ‘But I can tell you something interesting. The attacks stopped at Sevigny.’
For a moment, Sybilla was silent. Then she said, ‘I think he made a great effort at Sevigny. The affliction afterwards was possibly all the worse for it.’
‘Is that all it means to you?’ Marthe said. ‘To me it means there is no disease. It means it’s curable, provided you root out the cause of it. Is it not worth an effort? No one would bring back a man doomed to blindness, but what if he isn’t?’
Sybilla’s blue gaze on hers was long and steady. ‘Then tell me,’ she said. ‘How would you reverse the process that brought Francis here?’
‘I?’ said Marthe. ‘What have I to do with it? You are his mother.’
Richard said, ‘You are raising false hopes. If you could offer my brother paradise upon earth tomorrow, you couldn’t tell him so. Do you think we haven’t tried to rouse him?’
‘But if you could reach him,’ Marthe said, ‘there might be some arguments he would listen to?’
‘If I could reach him,’ Sybilla said, ‘I could keep him alive.’
They both looked at her, Marthe without astonishment, and Richard with a kind of impatient tenderness. Marthe said, ‘I think you can waken him. I think you know you can waken him, but are afraid to attempt it. Am I right?’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Richard. ‘What are you saying? She has sat hour after hour, talking aloud by his bedside. There is nothing we haven’t tried.’
‘No,’ Sybilla said, and straightened her back. ‘There is one thing.… How did you know? There is one thing I haven’t tried, because it may not rouse him at all. And whether it does so or not, it may kill him.’
‘He is going to die anyway,’ Marthe said. ‘I can’t reach him, you see, as she did.’
‘As who did?’ said Richard.
The edge returned to Marthe’s tone. ‘I was brought up by an old crone who read fortunes in Lyon. You met her once. She had certain skills. She is dead now.’
‘But he has to be awake,’ Sybilla said. Her eyes were on Marthe, but she spoke as if she had not been listening. She added, suddenly, ‘You came to me, as soon as you heard about Francis. I told you once, I think, that you would need me.’
‘Oh, I do,’ said Marthe carelessly. ‘If only to persuade my furious husband that I haven’t butchered your son by driving his devastating Philippa out of the country. You were right. I should really never have gone back to Jerott. Intolerance drunk is bad enough, but intolerance sober is quite insupportable.’
*
The house of opium has many rooms, which may be visited every night after the key is first turned in the lock, and every night after it is withdrawn again.
Behind the last door is oblivion. Standing before it, one can go forwards or backwards; but beside it are not the places of exquisite pleasure: the faces of pure ones confined to pavilions, reclining on green cushions and beautiful carpets amid thornless lote-trees and banana trees, one over another; for these have gone with the smoke of the opium.
What remains, four years afterwards, are the haunted rooms of the departed: of a young, vigorous man with red hair and an old man left in his blood in a bothy; of a henchman dragged from his horse with an arrow in him, and another, darker of skin, dead of fighting in a Greek courtyard. Of a man returning from perilous seas to drown, seeking his son, near his homeland; of a girl dying blind behind yellow silk curtains, and another burning at night in an African pavilion. And a child, a son … an only son … playing with shells at the feet of the father who shortly would kill it.
One does not, of set purpose, linger long on such a threshold. Sooner or later, the chains must give way; the accusing, querulous voices cease; and the insistent, imperious summons, saying over and over, ‘Aucassins, damoisiax, sire! Ja sui jou li vostre amie, Et vos ne me haés mie!’
He had almost broken free when the tapers were lit: the tall candles set all round the high bed, their wax soaked with the same mandragora that long ago had burned round another bed where he lay ill, between